Exclusive: Michael Dell Is Talkin' Cloud

By samdizzy

Michael Dell sees big opportunities ahead for Boomi, Dell's cloud integration platform for partners and customers. During an exclusive interview with Talkin' Cloud's sister site, The VAR Guy, Dell described how Boomi, Quest Software and other acquisitions position the computer giant for a cloud services push.

No doubt Dell faces an intense cloud battle vs. traditional hardware foes — IBM SmartCloud, HP Cloud, Oracle Cloud. Plus Dell must convince customers and partners that his cloud tools have leapfrogged those from public cloud providers like Amazon.com and Rackspace.

Dell is leaving no stone unturned. The company is testing ARM processors for cloud services, while also training customers and partners on the Boomi tool — which allows users to link multiple cloud or on-premises applications together.

Here's a sampling of what Dell told The VAR Guy.

The VAR Guy: Do you see ARM having a place in Dell’s own cloud, or is Dell Cloud an x86 cloud?

Dell: To the extent there’s demand for that, it’s a relatively easy thing to do. The most immediate thing we’re for customers with Dell Cloud Services is helping customers extend their own environments with things like bursting. For those who have spikey workloads but want a secure environment like their on-premises environment, that’s our focus.

The VAR Guy: Quest Software has been a leader in migrating Exchange customer to the cloud. Quest has been a leader in virtualizations and migrations. Could Quest be the lever that lifts Dell customers into the cloud?

Dell: There’s another real gem in the Dell portfolio for the cloud and that’s Dell Boomi. The two big problems customers have when they go to the cloud is security and data integration. Those are big issues we are focused on. With security it’s identiy and access management (from Quest), network security and firewalls.

How do you manage a dynamic environment in terms of new threats everyday. Also, cloud is great but how do I integrate old applications with new cloud applications, or how do I integrate multiple cloud applications together? That’s what Boomi does.

The VAR Guy: How is Boomi performing for Dell? Do partners understand the opportunity?

Dell: We actually post the data everyday on the Boomi site. A year ago, there were a little under 300,000 integration events per day. Today we’re up to over 1 million per day. So that’s how it’s going. (Dell laughs with confidence). It’s going really well. Large and small organizations are using Boomi every single day to make everything work together. How do airlines communicate with the OneWorld airline alliance? Boomi is an incredibly powerful tool for that.

Next Moves

So what else does Dell have on his mind? Our sister site, The VAR Guy, will share the answers soon.